


we’ll keep dancing wherever we go next

by prettydizzeed



Category: High School Musical (Movies)
Genre: Canon Compliant, First Kiss, Fluff, M/M, Nostalgia, Post-Canon, Reminiscing, School Reunion, Ten Years Later
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-22
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-12 01:33:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29627079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettydizzeed/pseuds/prettydizzeed
Summary: “Do you ever have that moment,” Chad asks, “when you look back and think about someone you always thought was really cool, and maybe you weren’t entirely sure why, and then you realize, ‘oh shit, I was really gay for them’?”“No,” Ryan says, staring blankly at him. Kelsi elbows him, rolling her eyes.
Relationships: Chad Danforth/Ryan Evans
Comments: 15
Kudos: 120





	we’ll keep dancing wherever we go next

**Author's Note:**

> originally wanted to post this summer of 2018 since that’d be ten years after they graduated... better late than never lmao
> 
> warnings for brief discussions of bi/homophobia, racism, and the general shittiness of high school. title is of course from “can i have this dance” from hsm3

If Chad’s being honest, he’s not entirely sure why he’s here. If he’s being even more honest, like, the kind you can’t replicate after it stops being socially acceptable to have sleepovers, he still remembers him and Troy swearing they wouldn’t be those guys who peaked in high school. “We’ll be at the ten-year reunion,” Troy had said, “but not, like, to relive the glory days or whatever bullshit. Just to drink some cheap wine and prove we’re still kicking ass at life. And, like, well-rounded or whatever.” 

That might, Chad would only admit at 3am from the floor of his childhood bedroom, have something to do with it. 

He does not, in fact, feel like he’s kicking ass at life, but he didn’t peak in high school, either, which has gotta count for something. So he puts on a light blue button-down and some slacks, kisses his mom on the cheek on his way out the door, and drives to East High.

Everything feels small. 

He remembers thinking that his senior year, too—big fish in a little pond and all that—but not with the same kind of context. Like, after playing for U of A, the high school gym is downright minuscule, to the extent that it’s all he can think about as he checks in, gets his nametag, and narrowly avoids spilling his water all over a brunette woman as he turns to leave the drinks table. 

“Chad!” she says, face lighting up in recognition, and he has the immediate sense that his evening is about to get a lot more interesting than he’d planned. 

“Hey, Kelsi,” he says, shifting his drink to the other hand to give her a quick side-hug when she holds her arm out. “How are things?” 

“Good, good,” she says, grinning; she looks genuinely excited to see him, which is more of a relief than he would’ve expected. “Ryan and I flew in last night; we spent the night at his parents’ place, and god, if I’d known the beds were that soft, I would’ve demanded to move in during high school.” 

Chad laughs, and Kelsi takes a sip of the wine she picked up, then gestures across the gym with her cup. “We’re at a table over there, if you want to join us.” 

It’s easy to let Kelsi lead him across the room, some old muscle memory from following her instructions for countless hours at rehearsals back in the day. She looks more self-assured now than she did then; it’s hard to imagine this woman cowering from anyone, even a cutthroat drama queen. Her hair is short now, just shy of a pixie cut were it not for the way it’s shaved on one side, and her dark green pantsuit is as stunning as it is surprising to anyone who’d expected her to still be a wallflower. 

Juilliard did her good, he thinks, or maybe something in the years after that—he won’t pretend to have any idea what she’s been up to lately. He doesn’t keep up with Facebook anymore, which is maybe the coolest thing about him at 28. God. 

“Oh, hey, Chad,” Taylor says when they get closer, setting her phone down and standing up to hug him. Beside her, Ryan looks up, his face momentarily flashing with surprise before he gives Kelsi a really complicated look.

“Hey, Madam Future President,” he teases, and Taylor rolls her eyes at him.

“I didn’t know you were coming.” They haven’t exactly kept in touch, but he called to congratulate her when she got into law school, and then again when she graduated at the top of her class, and they’ve gotten coffee two or three times over the years when they were both home for the holidays, so maybe he should’ve messaged her or something. 

“I heard something about you giving a speech,” he says, grinning at her. “Wouldn't miss that for the world.” 

She swats him on the arm as she goes to sit back down. “God, don’t remind me.” 

“Hey, just think of it this way: remember how stressed you were about your valedictorian speech at graduation? Ten years from now, no one’ll remember this one, either.” Taylor glares at him murderously as Kelsi pulls out the chair between her and Ryan, but by the time he’s sat down, she’s laughing. 

“I could still recite that, you know,” she says, and he grins at her. 

“I’d expect nothing less.” During the lull in the conversation, Chad looks around the gym. “I kind of thought you were supposed to have a reunion someplace classy.”

Kelsi shrugs. “Nostalgia with an inaccurate backdrop, or something. They’re probably just too underfunded to rent a place.”

“You call it nostalgia, I call it flashbacks,” Ryan says with a dramatic shudder. “I swore I’d never come back here,” he explains to Chad. “Lucky me, it’s a new building.” 

“Gotta love technicalities,” Kelsi says, grinning, and Chad isn’t sure what kind of bet she won, but she’s clearly the only reason Ryan’s here. Which—he looks good. More polished, for sure, but still unmistakably flamboyant; he’s wearing a perfectly tailored black suit with a hot pink pocket square that matches the band on his trilby. Having foregone a tie, the top two buttons of his dress shirt are undone, and he’s wearing a long silver necklace. His hair is darker, Chad notices.

“Wait, so why are you here?” Chad asks, and Kelsi smiles. 

“Closure,” she says cryptically, and Ryan rolls his eyes.

“God, I feel dull,” he says, looking around at the rest of the gym, fingers curled artfully around his plastic cup. Chad raises an eyebrow like, _Who, you?_ and he shrugs, but the corner of his mouth tugs upwards. “To them,” he says, gesturing broadly at the room, “I’m exactly who everyone expected me to be. Which, don’t get me wrong, is a pretty damn good thing, but it’s also so _boring._ The whole point of this is to have a chance to prove that you’ve reinvented yourself.”

Chad thinks about what Troy said senior year and thinks he gets what Ryan means. “Maybe for you,” he says, smirking. “For me, it’s a chance to finally sleep with a cheerleader.”

Ryan laughs, but it softens quickly. He looks down at his glass. “I saw your Facebook post, a few years ago, by the way. I considered messaging you, but—I don’t know, it seemed weird. I figured you probably had some people in your life by then who could help better than a random guy from high school.”

Chad swallows. He’d realized basically as soon as he bumped into Kelsi that he’d had absolutely no plan for this thing, because he wasn’t sure what he would’ve done next if she hadn’t invited him to sit with them, but this is way more out of left field than anything he’d imagined he’d talk about tonight. Which was probably naïve of him, honestly, given how much of the graduating class still followed him at the time and how goddamn nosy people can be. Not that he minds Ryan bringing it up—the opposite, really; he appreciates the, like, gesture of solidarity or whatever—but still. It’s a lot, more than he expected it to be, talking about his sexuality in a weird mirror image of the gym that used to be his entire life.

“Yeah, I did have some people in my corner,” Chad says. “Not as many as I thought, I guess, but.” Troy isn’t here today, which is fitting, because Troy hasn’t been there for the past three and a half years. Friends since kindergarten, and then just… nothing.

Kelsi nods like she gets it, which she probably does. “Guess that makes this the gay table, huh?” she says, and Chad raises an eyebrow at Taylor, who shrugs.

“What, am I about to find out that was some sort of lavender prom date situation?” he asks, and she rolls her eyes. 

“I’m bi, too,” she says, “so I think that just makes it a regular prom date. Well, and ace.” 

He tilts his head for a second, considering. “Still purple. That’s gotta count for something.” Taylor hides her grin in her cup, but not before Chad catches it. The best of himself from back then, the part that could make her laugh, is still around, then. Good.

“I can’t believe I’m asking this,” he says half an hour or so later, after hearing about the latest shows Ryan and Kelsi are working on and the greatly redacted portions of cases Taylor’s allowed to talk about, “but where’s Sharpay?” 

Ryan shrugs, but his mouth goes tight at the corners the way it used to when he was trying to fight back a smile. “The pool, probably. She teaches drama at East High,” he explains, “Didn’t want to basically show up at work on a weekend.” 

Probably just didn’t want people to know what, exactly, her work was, Chad thinks, but he doesn’t say it. “At, uh, Magma Springs?” he asks instead.

“ _Lava_ Springs,” Ryan corrects primly, but he’s definitely trying not to laugh now. “But yeah, she might’ve left our parents’ house, but she was not about to pass up a free membership at their country club.”

“As opposed to Ryan, who pays for his own country club memberships,” Kelsi teases, and Ryan elbows her. Chad, though, he’s still thinking about the country club, hauling golf clubs across the manicured grass and being pissed off at Troy and telling Ryan Evans he didn’t dance. 

He swallows, swirls his water in his cup. You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take, and all that bullshit, and if he can’t talk about this stuff now, with people who will get it but whose opinions won’t negatively affect his life in any sort of long-term way if they don’t, how is he supposed to be open about himself under any less favorable circumstances later? “Do you ever have that moment,” he asks finally, “when you look back and think about someone you always thought was really cool, and maybe you weren’t entirely sure why, and then you realize, ‘oh shit, I was really gay for them’?”

“No,” Ryan says, staring blankly at him. Kelsi elbows him, rolling her eyes, and only then does Chad realize that the confused look was a joke. 

“We can’t all come out of the womb dead-set on destroying heteronormativity,” Kelsi teases. “Some of us take a while.” She turns to Chad. “All the fucking time.”

“Yeah,” he says slowly. “I think I’m having one of those moments right now.”

Ryan barely even blinks in surprise. Fucking actors. “Holy shit, the baseball game?” he asks, laughing. “The fact that you didn’t realize you were queer right then is honestly astounding. I thought I was going to _die_.”

Kelsi groans into her hands. “Oh my god, why did you bring that up? I’ve had to listen to him talk about that enough for a lifetime.” It almost looks like Ryan blushes, but it could just as easily be the terrible lighting in the gym. “This is what I get for dragging you here,” Kelsi says, sighing dramatically. Chad wonders if Ryan’s rubbed off on her over the years, or if she’s always been like this and he just never noticed, never got close enough to be shown. 

He dares to glance around the rest of the gym for the first time this evening, and counts two, maybe three guys from the team, all JV guys, no one he was close enough with to try to talk to. Maybe Troy was more right than they knew, hit on some deep truth of the human experience while drunk on spiked punch after winning their second championship in a row. Twin scholarships in the bag, Chad had thought, whole life uphill together from there. It’s not that he’s unhappy now, or anything, and he doesn’t want to go back—god forbid—but maybe he wishes his teenage self had spent more time with people who cared more about who he was than how many three-pointers he could shoot. He thought he and Troy would be like Kelsi and Ryan, still wound so closely into each other’s lives that no section is entirely separate even this many years later, and it stings in a way he hasn’t felt about it in years to witness the extent to which they aren’t. 

Chad has friends—a best friend, even, who tries to drag him to dinner with her and her girlfriend more weekends than not—but no one who knows the context to these moments without him having to explain it, the larger-than-life fear and excitement and shame interwoven in all of his time at East High.

“—and you’re a genius with the costume crew, so I don’t know why you insist on keeping that denim monstrosity in your closet, much less _wearing it,_ ” Ryan is saying, apparently wrapping up whatever loving insults he and Kelsi have been exchanging for the past several minutes. 

“She looks great now,” Chad offers, and Ryan smirks and informs him that _he_ picked out that outfit, and thank you, doesn’t the color bring out her eyes? and they carry on like that until Taylor’s speech, after which they whoop louder than Chad has since the last time he went to a U of A game, at homecoming a few years back. 

“Okay, okay,” Taylor says after half of the gym has already trickled out, a little bit tipsy from the cups of wine she’d downed after getting her speech over with, “worst and best high school memory, go.”

“It’s late,” Ryan says, looking at his watch, “I was about to head out—”

Taylor points at him, a slightly unsteady finger that nevertheless brokers no argument. “We’re all doing it, come on, the whole nine yards of nostalgia. I’ll go first: worst is when some fucking asshole who sat behind me in geometry freshman year would not stop playing with my hair, creepiest shit.” She gestures at Chad to proceed, and he tilts his head, considering. 

“Worst is when Coach made us run suicides all practice the day my first girlfriend dumped me. I was so dehydrated from crying all day, I almost passed out.”

“Geez,” Kelsi says, frowning in concern. “Okay, uh, when I got outed to my parents.” They all wince in unison. Ryan pats her shoulder.

“Junior year, when I lost the audition for the winter musical,” Ryan says, smirking, and Chad throws an empty plastic cup at him, which Ryan bats out of the way. 

“You’re totally lying,” he says, and Ryan holds up his hands in mock surrender.

“Yeah, okay. First day of class senior year.”

“Why?” Chad asks, surprised and gentle. “Because everything was ending?” He’d thought about that a lot at the time, all those last firsts.

“No,” Ryan says, shifting in his chair, “I, uh, I just thought some things had changed over the summer, and I guess they hadn’t.”

Chad swallows. He can’t be _sure_ that it’s about him, right, but also, come on. The, like, Wildcats-with-a-capital-W, school-spirit-out-the-ass in-crowd had treated Ryan like a friend all summer, and then everything had gone back to normal the second the first homeroom bell had rung. “I can't speak for anybody else,” he says, and stops to clear his throat, “but, uh, I was a dick, and I felt really bad about it after, and just didn’t know how to fix it.” 

Ryan nods, and they all just kind of sit in that moment for a bit.

“Let me guess,” Chad says after a minute, turning to look at Taylor, “the best moment was winning the Scholastic Decathlon.” 

She shakes her head, lips pressed into a quiet smile. “Prom.”

“Seriously?” he blinks. “I was worried I was, like, the worst date ever.”

“No,” she says, grinning openly at the memory now. “I mean, I was horrified you had your basketball number on your suit, and we both knew by then that we were never going to be romantically compatible, but… it was fun. Maybe the one time I really felt like a teenager.” 

“Mine was definitely the final night of the musical, senior year,” Kelsi says. “No last-minute actor arrivals, no more worrying about Juilliard, just us, and this thing we’d created, and all this hope and excitement for the future.” She smiles to herself, and Chad finds himself smiling, too. Despite all the chaos of opening night, the following performances had gone off without a hitch. It had been really fun, one of those moments you knew even while you were living it that you’d keep looking back on later with warmth. 

“The Star Dazzle award, summer before senior year,” Ryan offers. “I mean, I’d won plenty of them before, but that time… I felt like I was part of something, you know?”

“What about you?” Taylor asks, looking at Chad. “Which championship was better?”

He didn’t have to think very long about this one. He shakes his head. “Actually, uh, it was a baseball game. After a baseball game, specifically. Senior year, the last one of the season. We’d just gotten our asses kicked, like, it was a bloodbath. I was the last one on the field, just, like, wallowing in my teenage angst, and then you, uh,” he tips his chin at Ryan, “you called from the stands, ‘Great moves out there, Danforth!’ And I just… I hadn’t laughed that hard all semester.” He can’t help smiling to himself, remembering it. “We just, like, messed around on the field until it got dark, chasing each other and throwing the ball back and forth.”

Ryan’s expression is a net positive, that much is obvious, but the nuances of it are unreadable. A sharp, almost painful joy and an aching loneliness and an adult distance from it all, the kind they’d known as if from outside of themselves that they’d one day feel looking back at it, and a large handful of other feelings Chad can’t begin to pin down. 

“It was good to see you guys,” Kelsi says after a minute of silence, and stands to give Chad a hug that he earnestly returns. Taylor does the same, and then frowns down at herself.

“God, I flew in, so I don’t have a car, and I do not want to call my mom to pick me up from my high school while tipsy.” 

Chad snorts. “She’d get a kick out of that,” he agrees, and as Taylor gets out her phone to call an Uber, Kelsi intervenes. 

“Where are you staying? I'll drive you back,” she says. Taylor gives an address, and Kelsi nods, taking her elbow and walking her to the double doors. “I’m taking your car,” she calls to Ryan over her shoulder, and he gives a long-suffering sigh. Funny, until tonight, Chad couldn’t have pictured that interaction any way but the other way around.

“Think I could trouble you for a ride home?” Ryan asks, and Chad nods, helping him collect the trash from their table.

“Sure thing. What was that all about, anyway?”

Ryan rolls his eyes. “She thinks if she forces me to be alone with him, I’ll tell this guy that I liked him a decade ago and maybe we’ll kiss under the shitty fluorescents or something. You know, very Hollywood.”

“Thought you worked at Broadway, Evans,” Chad says, and Ryan stops avoiding his eyes long enough to shoot him a smirk. They start making their way toward the exit.

“Wow, ten years, and you still don’t know my first name,” Ryan says, and Chad laughs. He can’t help it; he feels weightless, in a way he didn’t know it was possible to be in a space like this, anchored to the ground by so many memories. He holds the door for Ryan, and that’s it, they’re out of there, letting all the old ghosts dissipate back into the early New Mexico night. Leaving East High for the first last time hadn’t felt like a weight off his shoulders to Chad, but it clearly had for Ryan, and he stands a little more upright even now. 

Chad unlocks his car. Opens the passenger door. 

“Ryan,” Chad says, and he’s close enough that he can see Ryan swallow. 

Their seatbelts click closed.

“Yeah?” Ryan breathes, and Chad turns to him, and leans just enough forward for Ryan to meet him in the middle.

**Author's Note:**

> i’m on tumblr @campgender if you want to say hi!


End file.
